Under pressure from IBM, Novell and the Linux community, SCO Group said on Friday it will open up next week "hundreds of lines of Linux code" that will put to rest industry doubts about its legal case against IBM.

"This will be of benefit to the software community and opportunity to see the tip of the iceberg of the evidence SCO has gathered," said SCO CEO Darl McBride, who said customers, analysts and media will be able to view the code under non-disclosure beginning next week. "There are direct lines of code from Unix and Unixware in Linux and in the Linux kernel."

He also said Novell "caused confusion" earlier this week by alleging that it--and not SCO--owned the patents and copyrights to Unix.

McBride, a former Novell executive himself, said he was "surprised" about Novell's letter challenging SCO's ownership of Unix earlier this week and claimed Novell's claims to Unix copyrights and patent issues have no merit, but said SCO attorneys will meet with Novell.

McBride said while SCO's attorneys will face off against Novell attorneys on those claims, the company's case against IBM is based on contracts--not patents and copyright issues.

Once again, McBride defended the breach-of-contract lawsuit it filed against IBM on March 7 charging Big Blue misappropriated Unix System V code licensed from SCO. It also emphasized its legal right to enforce its 30,000 System V contracts signed with more than 6,000 companies.